When I review someone else’s flow and notice the version number of the flow is in its 40s, I think “What?! You have 40 versions of this flow? That’s cray cray.”

Did you know that there is a limit to the number of versions you can have for each flow?

It doesn’t matter if your flow is autolaunched from a process or whether you have interactive flow screens. Did you know that you can make changes to your flow, save the changes and test them out, rinse and repeat, WITHOUT having to activate the flow?  YES! That way, you can test out your flow, make tweaks to it and still keep your flow versions to a minimum.  How great is that?!

This is done by clicking on the powerful “Run” button, which appears as the third button in the Cloud Flow Designer button bar (see below) runs the most recent saved version of the flow that you have open. Note: If the flow contains subflow elements, each subflow runs the active version of its referenced flow. If the referenced flow has no active version, then the subflow element runs the latest version of its referenced flow.

 Once you’ve saved your changes and are ready to test, click on the Run button for a flow with interactive screens, it will open up and run your saved flow in a separate tab.

For autolaunched flows, you will need to create an initial screen flow element to place in front of the first step in your interactive flow. This screen will include the the input fields that are being passed from a process. This first screen will allow you to manually add the data into the input fields that would be passed from a process for testing purposes. Then, after you save the flow, click on the Run button for a flow with interactive screens, it will open up and run your saved flow in a separate tab. Once everything is tested and working fine, remove that initial input field screen and set the first screen according, save and activate the flow.

By using this button, it will drastically drive down the number of versions you have of any given flow when you make a change, save, activate and test. Then, go back to rinse and repeat.